Chess is to humans as Bitcoin is to computers (Chess : Humans :: Bitcoin : Computers). Except humans stick up for the wastefulness of both, and computers stay silent on the matter.

> computers stay silent on the matter.

I don’t know, their fans complain quite loudly.

You know little about either chess or bitcoin. The first enables self knowledge, molds character, and helps develop a mental model transferable to other pursuits; the second is the first iteration of computer money.

>The first enables self knowledge, molds character, and helps develop a mental model transferable to other pursuits;

That's what quickly got me out of chess, when it was me playing with my brother as a kid it was about thinking really hard and trying to explore as many options as I could - it was really about who can think faster and outsmarting eachother since we only knew the rules.

When I decided to look into chess I found out it was about learning openings, recognising patterns, traps, etc. I didn't feel any smarter learning those, I just learned more about chess. You can draw up silly strategic methapores with any activity, but chess does seem to have that Sun Tzu status.

I kindly disagree. It may appear that chess is a memoization game, but when or if you want to become a master of the game , you'll notice that rote learning will not take you there.

You do need to understand phases of the game, set up strategy, estimate your position, know when to attack or to defend, and have confidence in your technique.

Mind you, that is only for the plain master title (FIDE or even a national master). Grandmasters are a whole new level in comparison, aliens.

But this wasn't my critique. Chess strategy is again chess specific, the things that translate are going to be superficial. You can draw parallels between many domains, like there are phases, strategy and coordination in many competitive online games, and I'd argue that the cooperative nature translates better to most real world than chess.

Chess has this poetic image of playing around with kings, queens and pawns that lets artist paint grandiose metaphors about real world, but at the end of the day spending a bunch of time on chess is going to make you good at chess, doubt it will do much better than any other similar hobby for transferable skills.

Agreed. Taleb coined this the “ludic fallacy”:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludic_fallacy

“… the focus on those pure, well-defined, and easily discernible objects like triangles, or more social notions like friendship or love, at the cost of ignoring those objects of seemingly messier and less tractable structures.”

Kasparov wrote a book called „How Live Imitates Chess“ that tries to prove you wrong.

Any hobby falls to the same criticism.

Which is exactly my point, chess is just another game but it has this social status where it's a sign of intelligence or whatnot. The whole thread is in response to OP making such claims.

Learning doesn't make you smart, but it can makes you wiser.

but studying hard topics can teach you thinking tactics for analyzing problems and looking for thr big picture.

>> the second is the first iteration of computer money.

I mean... I am charitably trying to find interpretation/context in which this is meaningfully true, and failing. In which way is bitcoin more "computer money" than any other money these days?

I purchase things, pay my bills, obtain payment, invest, and do all my transactions at least 95% digitally, with "computer money".

Uncharitably, I could call Bitcoin "that, but less practical / more wasteful". Charitably, I could say "There are specific goals/circumstances where Bitcoin has benefits".

But I feel it's decades late to be "first iteration of computer money", unless there's some squinting and extremely specific ad-hoc defining that I haven't imagined. Even the "Money" part (as practical transactional currency) is these days increasingly less relevant,by proponents and pundits alike, as opposed to "investment vehicle" or "storage of value".

(as for chess, I don't know; I gave up when I realized how much memorization, as opposed to developing of understanding, was involved to get much better; it may indeed enable self-knowledge and mold character at some level beyond the ones I've achieved. Therefore, I cannot contribute to discussion on whether Chess is practical/efficient/meaningful way to grow those characteristics - i.e. hammering rocks for 5,000hrs probably grows character at some level but may not be sufficiently practical/efficient to matter. I respect it like a do Golf - it takes immense skill, dedication, and investment to develop it to a high level, and world-class players are incredibly good at it; but it's not a skill I desire to grow myself anymore).

"Computer money" isn't a great term to describe the difference indeed. Rather, some call it the first digital scarcity, or sound money.

Emphasis is on how minting, the creation of new money, is strictly enforced by the protocol (software), and decentralized. Further, it is hard-capped.

As such, it's money that is born digitally, natively. This extends to ownership, which is just a bunch of private keys.

Digital scarcity and sound money cannot be the same, as scarcity and money are at odds with each other.

No they're not. Money is supposed to be scarce and has been for the vast majority of the history of civilization.

But let's agree to disagree there. Even then, money has multiple roles: unit of account, store of value.

Currently, Bitcoin plays the role of storing value. Like a savings account, or "digital gold". Not for payments. It might play a payment role in the future on layer 2, or it might not. Too soon to tell.

> the second is the first iteration of computer money.

The first iteration of computer money is called 'regular money'. Nobody uses cash anymore, we all use computer money.

What an utterly moronic take

Would you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments, and start following the site guidelines? You've been doing this kind of thing repeatedly and we ban that sort of account. It's not what this site is for, as you'll see if you review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

> elaborate a waste of human intelligence

Hmm… any way we can turn chess into a proof of work algorithm? xD

Yes, it proves humans work.

He must not have had much experience with quant desks at trading firms.

Chandler did not. He died in 1959.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Chandler

I thought "advertising agency" was referencing that the best minds of our generation are thinking about how to make people click ads at google/facebook.

I guess it was always a thing even back then?

I think he meant that the best minds of his generation were devising advertising campaigns and writing advertising copy for laundry soap and canned vegetables. Advertising was more text-centric then, and talented writers like Chandler could make more money writing ads than books.

Possible. But I think more likely is that it was a good frame of reference for him as he was an executive at an advertising agency for quite some time.

I don't think that's correct. Outside of writing, his career was spent in an oil company.

The quote is from 1940.